Is Miro free? What it actually costs in 2026
Miro is free for unlimited members but only the three most recent boards stay editable. Starter is $8 a member a month billed yearly.
The Free plan has no seat charge and no member cap. You can create as many boards as you like; only the three most recently touched remain editable, the rest become read-only.
What the free tier actually includes
- Three editable boards — older ones lock
- Unlimited members
- Paid features such as private boards and advanced integrations are not included
Where the wall is
The fourth board. A team that runs one retro, one roadmap and one brainstorm has used its three; opening a fourth locks the oldest.
After that: Starter $8 per member a month billed yearly ($96 a year); Business $20 per member a month billed yearly ($240 a year), with a 14-day trial; Enterprise is custom from 30 members. Monthly billing costs about 20% more.
Can you self-host Miro? No — cloud only
Miro is hosted only. Excalidraw, tldraw and draw.io are the open-source whiteboards compared here; Excalidraw and draw.io self-host in a single container.
What it actually takes to run one yourself
Real RAM against the documented minimum, monthly cost, setup time, and the one thing that catches people out.
When paying is still the right call
Stay if facilitated workshops are a real part of how you work — Miro's templates, voting, timers and facilitation tools have no equivalent in the open options, and a good facilitator is measurably more effective with them. Stay if non-technical colleagues across the business rely on it, because adoption is the hard part and you already have it. Stay for enterprise needs: SSO, permissions, audit and data residency. And stay if you are inside the free tier, though three boards rarely lasts.
What you are locked into
Low technically, high socially. Boards export to image or PDF and Miro provides a JSON export, so the content comes out even if the fidelity does not. The real friction is that boards are shared artefacts: links live in tickets, documents and calendar invites across the organisation, and moving means every one of those references breaks. Teams that treat boards as disposable workshop output migrate trivially; teams that use them as durable documentation are moving a wiki that happens to be a canvas.
If you would rather not pay: Excalidraw
Excalidraw
Hand-drawn style diagrams, instantly, for nothing.
Free and open source. Excalidraw+ is an optional paid hosted tier.
See all 5 Miro alternatives comparedCompare the free options head-to-head
Read from Miro's own pricing and documentation on 2026-09-23 — 41 days ago. Vendors change prices without notice; confirm before you commit.